Description

In this game you play the role of a barbarian who must navigate his way through dangerous dungeons. The game is played from a third person side scrolling perspective and also has platform jumping parts to it. The barbarian is controlled by using left and right on the joystick to move and up and down is used to scroll through the various commands at the bottom of the screen.
When a command is highlighted pressing fire will perform that action thus saving on extra buttons being needed to play. There are two weapons at your disposal. A sword which you start the game with and later a bow which is handy for long range attacks. There are many traps to avoid and various monsters who have different attack patterns.

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Trivia

Cover art

The box cover artwork and Barbarian/Psygnosis logos were created by Roger Dean. The painting used for the cover, called Red Dragon III, was later used again as a cover for Steve Howe on the 1994 album Not Necessarily Acoustic. At the back of the CD booklet under the artwork credits you can find the message "Hello Psygnosis".

Debugger

In the PC version, the developers apparently forgot to remove a debugger of sorts from the game. When you are asked to select the control method ("Press 1, 2 or 3"), press 4. Then start the game as usual, and...

Speech

Barbarian features speech through the PC Speaker, but was done using the technically inferior 1-bit method as opposed to the more sophisticated 6- and 8-bit methods employed by other games. As a result, the speech is quite loud and distorted.